Not only that, but every time a page load happens. There is a cronjob that gets executed.

You can seperate the cronjob by executing it by duration ( a real cronjob), instead of executing it every page load.

Nginx vs properly configured apache makes little difference on for a small-to-medium site. What makes a difference is fastcgi caching, it's an important difference.

What are your thoughts on https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/215945987-Web-s..., which seems to say otherwise? Likely configured wrong?

Agreed. An overloaded WordPress site with a minimal 5 minute page cache can now handle a HN storm. Throw in a CDN for the static assets, disable commenting, and it could likely handle the front page of Reddit.

Amazing how fast a site becomes when it's no longer recalculating every response.

For commenting you can always use Disqus which would take the load off your database.

Oh? How big of a difference does that make? I'm not even sure what to measure? I can host 100 WP sites that generate a total of 100000 hits in a day using Apache requires X RAM and X Cores but using NGINX I could do that with only X RAM and R Cores? Did you find something like that? I'd love to squeeze more out of what I have if I can do it with NGNIX.

I don't have specifics like that, but I've noticed drastic improvements in page load time when I moved a site from Apache to NGINX. This post was the motivation:

http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2014/06/25/40-million-hits-a-da...

Oh that's mine :) Glad it was a motivator. There are surely better configs out there now with a lot more resources behind them like easyengine.

Thank you for mentioning this. I wish people understood this better.

Good tip! Added to the post